EVGA, having launched its X58 3X SLI motherboard which received raving reviews for its features, performance and price-point, looks to up the ante with a new flagship motherboard based on the Intel X58 platform for the Core i7 processors. While X58 motherboards start at the US $200 point, over a period, there has been a faint seggregation of the motherboards based on the prices and features, starting with a $200~240 range sans SLI support, $250~300 with SLI and >$300 enthusiast-grade range.

EVGA's upcoming motherboard fits into the top-range of motherboards, which finds competition in the likes of ASUS Rampage II Extreme and MSI X58 Eclipse Plus. VR-Zone conducted a detailed preview of this upcoming motherboard dubbed "X58 SLI Classified", with "classified" meaning that its brand name is yet to be announced. Looking at the way EVGA has been branding its flagship motherboards in the past, it could be safe to speculate it that it could be something along the lines of "FTW".

This motherboard embeds a NVIDIA nForce 200 BR-03 bridge chip apart from the X58+ICH10R combo. The chip manages bandwidth to the installed graphics cards. With four PCI-Express x16 available, the PCI-Express lanes are arranged as x16, x16, x16 when three graphics cards are installed in 3-way SLI, or (x16, x16, x8) for graphics + x8 for the fourth GeForce graphics card that handles NVIDIA PhysX acceleration.

The motherboard features a digital PWM-based CPU power circuit. It uses high-grade components throughout. Among other regular features are support for up to 24GB of DDR3 triple-channel memory, 8 SATA II ports, 8-channel audio and Firewire. To help overclocking, EVGA provides a pop-out control and diagnostics card. There is no word on its availability and pricing.